The Lord Clark | |
|---|---|
 Clark photographed in 1934 byHoward Coster | |
| Born | Kenneth Mackenzie Clark (1903-07-13)13 July 1903 Mayfair, London, England |
| Died | 21 May 1983(1983-05-21) (aged 79) Hythe, Kent, England |
| Alma mater | Trinity College, Oxford |
| Occupations |
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| Spouses | |
| Children | 3, includingAlan andColin |
Kenneth Mackenzie Clark, Baron Clark (13 July 1903 – 21 May 1983) was a British art historian, museum director and broadcaster. His expertise covered a wide range of artists and periods, but he is particularly associated withItalian Renaissance art, most of all that ofLeonardo da Vinci. After running two art galleries in the 1930s and 1940s, he came to wider public notice on television, presenting a succession of programmes on the arts from the 1950s to the 1970s, the largest and best known being theCivilisation series in 1969.
The son of rich parents, Clark was introduced to the arts at an early age. Among his early influences were the writings ofJohn Ruskin, which instilled in him the belief that everyone should have access to great art. After coming under the influence of the art expertsBernard Berenson andRoger Fry, Clark was appointed director of theAshmolean Museum inOxford aged twenty-seven, and three years later he was put in charge of Britain'sNational Gallery. His twelve years there saw the gallery transformed to make it accessible and inviting to a wider public. During theSecond World War, when the collection was moved from London for safe keeping, Clark made the building available for a series of daily concerts which proved a celebrated morale booster duringthe Blitz.
After the war, and three years asSlade Professor of Fine Art atOxford, Clark surprised many by accepting the chairmanship of the UK's firstcommercial television network. Once the service had been successfully launched he agreed to write and present programmes about the arts. These established him as a household name in Britain, and he was asked to create the first colour series about the arts,Civilisation, first broadcast in 1969 in Britain and in many other countries soon afterwards.
Among many honours, Clark wasknighted at the unusually young age of thirty-five, and three decades later was made alife peer shortly before the first transmission ofCivilisation. Three decades after his death, Clark was celebrated in an exhibition atTate Britain in London, prompting a reappraisal of his career by a new generation of critics and historians. Opinions varied about his aesthetic judgement, particularly in attributing paintings to old masters, but his skill as a writer and his enthusiasm for popularising the arts were widely recognised. Both theBBC and the Tate described him in retrospect as one of the most influential figures in British art of the twentieth century.
Clark was born at 32Grosvenor Square, London,[n 1] the only child of Kenneth Mackenzie Clark and his wife, (Margaret) Alice, daughter of James McArthur of Manchester.[2] The Clarks were a Scottish family who had grown rich in the textile trade. Clark's great-great-grandfather invented the cottonspool, and theClark Thread Company ofPaisley had grown into a substantial business.[1] Kenneth Clark senior worked briefly as a director of the firm and retired in his mid-twenties as a member of the "idle rich", as Clark junior later put it: although "many people were richer, there can have been few who were idler".[1][3] The Clarks maintained country homes at Sudbourne Hall, Suffolk, and atArdnamurchan, Argyll, and wintered on the French Riviera.[2][4] Kenneth senior was a sportsman, a gambler,[n 2] an eccentric and a heavy drinker.[2][6] Clark had little in common with his father, though he always remained fond of him. Alice Clark was shy and distant, but her son received affection from a devoted nanny.[7]
As an only child not especially close to his parents, the young Clark had a boyhood that was often solitary, but he was generally happy. He later recalled that he used to take long walks, talking to himself, a habit he believed stood him in good stead as a broadcaster: "Television is a form of soliloquy".[8] On a modest scale Clark senior collected pictures, and the young Kenneth was allowed to rearrange the collection. He developed a competent talent for drawing, for which he later won several prizes as a schoolboy.[9] When he was seven he was taken to an exhibition of Japanese art in London, which was a formative influence on his artistic tastes; he recalled, "dumb with delight, I felt that I had entered a new world".[10][11]
Clark was educated atWixenford School and, from 1917 to 1922,Winchester College. The latter was known for its intellectual rigour and – to Clark's dismay – enthusiasm for sports, but it also encouraged its pupils to develop interests in the arts.[12] The headmaster, Montague Rendall, was a devotee of Italian painting and sculpture; he inspired Clark, among many others, to appreciate the works ofGiotto,Botticelli,Bellini and their compatriots.[13] The school library contained the collected writings ofJohn Ruskin, which Clark read avidly, and which influenced him for the rest of his life, not only in their artistic judgments but in their progressive political and social beliefs.[14][n 3]
From Winchester, Clark won a scholarship toTrinity College, Oxford, where he studied modern history. He graduated in 1925 with a second-class honours degree. In theOxford Dictionary of National Biography,Sir David Piper comments that Clark had been expected to gain a first-class degree, but had not applied himself single-mindedly to his historical studies: "his interests had already turned conclusively to the study of art".[2]
While at Oxford, Clark was greatly impressed by the lectures ofRoger Fry, the influential art critic who staged the firstPost-Impressionism exhibitions in Britain. Under Fry's influence he developed an understanding of modern French painting, particularly the work ofPaul Cézanne.[16] Clark attracted the attention ofCharles F. Bell, Keeper of the Fine Art Department of theAshmolean Museum. Bell became a mentor to him and suggested that for hisB Litt thesis Clark should write about theGothic revival in architecture. At that time it was a deeply unfashionable subject; no serious study had been published since the nineteenth century.[17] Although Clark's main area of study was theRenaissance, his admiration for Ruskin, the most prominent defender of the neo-Gothic style, drew him to the topic. He did not complete the thesis, but later turned his researches into his first full-length book,The Gothic Revival (1928).[2] In 1925, Bell introduced Clark toBernard Berenson, an influential scholar of the Italian Renaissance and consultant to major museums and collectors. Berenson was working on a revision of his bookDrawings of the Florentine Painters, and invited Clark to help. The project took two years, overlapping with Clark's studies at Oxford.[18]
In 1929, as a result of his work with Berenson, Clark was asked to catalogue the extensive collection ofLeonardo da Vinci drawings atWindsor Castle. That year he was the joint organiser of an exhibition of Italian painting which opened at the Royal Academy on 1 January 1930. He and his co-organiserLord Balniel secured masterpieces never seen before outside Italy, many of them from private collections.[19] The exhibition covered Italian art "fromCimabue toSegantini" – from the mid-thirteenth to the late-nineteenth century.[20] It was greeted with public and critical acclaim, and raised Clark's profile, but he came to regret the propaganda value derived from the exhibition by the Italian dictatorBenito Mussolini who had been instrumental in making so many sought-after paintings available.[21] Several senior figures in the British art world disapproved of the exhibition; Bell was among them, but nevertheless he continued to regard Clark as his favoured successor at the Ashmolean.[22]
Clark was not convinced that his future lay in administration; he enjoyed writing, and would have preferred to be a scholar rather than a museum director.[23] Nonetheless, when Bell retired in 1931 Clark agreed to succeed him as Keeper of the Fine Art Department at the Ashmolean. Over the next two years Clark oversaw the building of an extension to the museum to provide a better space for his department.[24] The development was made possible by an anonymous benefactor, subsequently revealed as Clark himself.[25] His acquisitions while at the Ashmolean included a large piece of mid-19th-century furniture known as theGreat Bookcase. Victorian art and architecture were out of fashion in the 1930s, "generally despised and derided", according to the art historian Matthew Winterbottom,[26][n 4] but Clark believed that they should be represented in the collection, although the bookcase was not put on display until 2016.[26] A later curator of the museum wrote that Clark would be remembered for his time there, "when, with his characteristic mixture of arrogance and energy, he transformed both the collections and their display."[28]
In 1933 the director of theNational Gallery in London,Sir Augustus Daniel, was aged sixty-seven, and due to retire at the end of the year. His assistant director,W. G. Constable, who had been in line to succeed him, had moved to the newCourtauld Institute of Art as its director in 1932.[29] The historianPeter Stansky writes that behind the scenes the National Gallery "was in considerable turmoil; the staff and the trustees were in a state of continual warfare with each other."[30] The chairman of the trustees,Lord Lee, convinced theprime minister,Ramsay MacDonald, that Clark would be the best appointment, acceptable to the professional staff and the trustees, and able to restore harmony.[31] When he received MacDonald's offer of the post, Clark was not enthusiastic. He thought himself too young, aged 30, and once again felt torn between a scholarly and an administrative career. He accepted the directorship in January 1934, although, as he wrote to Berenson, "in between being the manager of a large department store I shall have to be a professional entertainer to the landed and official classes".[32]
At about the same time as accepting MacDonald's offer of the directorship, Clark had declined one fromKing George V's officials to succeedC. H. Collins Baker asSurveyor of the King's Pictures. He felt that he could not do justice to the post in tandem with his new duties at the gallery.[n 5] The king, determined to succeed where his staff had failed, went withQueen Mary to the National Gallery and persuaded Clark to change his mind.[34] The appointment was announced inThe London Gazette in July 1934;[35] Clark held the post for the next ten years.[36]
Clark believed in making fine art accessible to everyone, and while at the National Gallery he devised many initiatives with this aim in mind. In an editorial,The Burlington Magazine said, "Clark put all his insight and imagination into making the National Gallery a more sympathetic place in which the visitor could enjoy a great collection of European paintings".[37] He had rooms re-hung and frames improved; by 1935 he had achieved the installation of a laboratory and introduced electric lighting, which made evening opening possible for the first time. A programme of cleaning was begun, despite sporadic sniping from those opposed in principle to cleaning old pictures;[37][38] experimentally, the glass was removed from some pictures.[37][n 6] In several years he had the gallery opened two hours earlier than usual on the day of theFA Cup Final, for the benefit of people coming to London for the match.[40]
Clark wrote and lectured during the decade. The annotated catalogue of the royal collection of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings, on which he had begun work in 1929, was published in 1935, to highly favourable reviews; eighty years laterOxford Art Online called it "a work of firm scholarship, the conclusions of which have stood the test of time".[41] Another 1935 publication by Clark offended some in the avant-garde: an essay, published inThe Listener, "The Future of Painting", in which he rebukedsurrealists on the one hand andabstract artists on the other for claiming to represent the future of art. He judged both as too elitist and too specialised – "the end of a period of self-consciousness, inbreeding and exhaustion". He maintained that good art must be accessible to everyone and must be rooted in the observable world.[42] During the 1930s Clark was in demand as a lecturer, and he frequently used his research for his talks as the basis of his books. In 1936 he gave the Ryerson Lectures atYale University. From these came his study of Leonardo, published three years later; it too, attracted much praise, at the time and subsequently.[41]
The Burlington Magazine, looking back at Clark's time at the gallery, singled out among the works acquired under his leadership the seven panels formingSassetta's San Sepolcro Altarpiece from the fifteenth century, four works byGiovanni di Paolo from the same period,Niccolò dell'Abate'sThe Death of Eurydice from the sixteenth century andIngres'Madame Moitessier from the nineteenth.[43] Other important acquisitions, listed by Piper, wereRubens'sWatering Place,Constable'sHadleigh Castle,Rembrandt'sSaskia as Flora, andPoussin'sThe Adoration of the Golden Calf.[2]
One of Clark's least successful acts as director was buying four early-sixteenth century paintings now known asScenes from Tebaldeo's Eclogues.[44] He saw them in 1937 in the possession of a dealer in Vienna,[44] and against the united advice of his professional staff he persuaded the trustees to buy them.[2] He believed them to be byGiorgione, whose work he considered inadequately represented in the gallery at the time.[n 7] The trustees authorised the expenditure of £14,000 of public funds and the paintings went on display in the gallery with considerable fanfare.[44] His staff did not accept the attribution to Giorgione, and within a year scholarly research established the paintings as the work ofAndrea Previtali, one of Giorgione's minor contemporaries.[44] The British press protested at the waste of taxpayers' money, Clark's reputation suffered a considerable blow, and his relations with his professional team, already uneasy, were further strained.[2][n 8]
The approach of war with Germany in 1939 obliged Clark and his colleagues to consider how to protect the National Gallery's collection from bombing raids. It was agreed that all the works of art must be moved out of central London, where they were acutely vulnerable. One suggestion was to send them to Canada for safekeeping, but by this time the war had started and Clark was worried about the possibility of submarine attacks on the ships taking the collection across the Atlantic; he was not displeased when the prime minister,Winston Churchill, vetoed the idea: "Hide them in caves and cellars, but not one picture shall leave this island."[49] Adisused slate mine nearBlaenau Ffestiniog in north Wales was chosen as the store. To protect the paintings special storage compartments were constructed, and from careful monitoring of the collection discoveries were made about control of temperature and humidity that benefited its care and display when back in London after the war.[49]
With an empty gallery to preside over, Clark contemplated volunteering for theRoyal Naval Volunteer Reserve, but was recruited, at Lord Lee's instigation, into the newly formedMinistry of Information, where he was put in charge of the film division, and was later promoted to be controller of home publicity.[50] He set up theWar Artists' Advisory Committee, and persuaded the government to employ officialwar artists in considerable numbers. There were up to two hundred engaged under Clark's initiative. Those designated "official war artists" includedEdward Ardizzone,Paul andJohn Nash,Mervyn Peake,John Piper andGraham Sutherland.[51] Artists employed on short-term contracts includedJacob Epstein,Laura Knight,L. S. Lowry,Henry Moore andStanley Spencer.[52]
Although the pictures were in storage, Clark kept the National Gallery open to the public during the war, hosting a celebrated series of lunchtime and early evening concerts. They were the inspiration of the pianistMyra Hess, whose idea Clark greeted with delight, as a suitable way for the building to be "used again for its true purposes, the enjoyment of beauty."[53] There was no advance booking, and audience members were free to eat their sandwiches and walk in or out during breaks in the performance.[54] The concerts were an immediate and enormous success.The Musical Times commented, "Countless Londoners and visitors to London, civilian and service alike, came to look on the concerts as a haven of sanity in a distraught world."[55] 1,698 concerts were given to an aggregate audience of more than 750,000 people.[56] Clark instituted an additional public attraction of a monthly featured picture brought from storage and exhibited along with explanatory material. The institution of a "picture of the month" was retained after the war, and, at 2025, has continued to the present day.[57]
In 1945, after overseeing the return of the collections to the National Gallery, Clark resigned as director, intending to devote himself to writing. During the war years he had published little. For the gallery he wrote a slim volume about Constable'sThe Hay Wain (1944); from a lecture he gave in 1944 he published a short treatise onLeon Battista Alberti'sOn Painting (1944). The following year he contributed an introduction and notes to a volume on Florentine paintings in a series of art books published byFaber and Faber. The three publications totalled fewer than eighty pages between them.[58]
In July 1946 Clark was appointedSlade Professor of Fine Art atOxford for a three-year term.[59] The post required him to give eight public lectures each year on the "History, Theory, and Practice of the Fine Arts".[60] The first holder of the professorship had been Ruskin; Clark took as his first subject Ruskin's tenure of the post.[61]James Stourton, Clark's authorised biographer, judges the appointment to be the most rewarding his subject ever held, and notes how, during this period, Clark established himself as Britain's most sought-after lecturer, and wrote two of his finest books,Landscape into Art (1947) andPiero della Francesca (1951).[61][n 9] By this time Clark no longer hankered after a career in pure scholarship, but saw his role as sharing his knowledge and experience with the wide public.[62]
Clark served on numerous official committees during this period,[n 10] and helped to stage a ground-breaking exhibition in Paris of works by his friend and protégé Henry Moore. He was more in sympathy with modern painting and sculpture than with much of modern architecture. He admiredGiles Gilbert Scott,Maxwell Fry,Frank Lloyd Wright,Alvar Aalto and others, but found many contemporary buildings mediocre.[64] Clark had been among the first to conclude that private patronage could no longer support the arts; during the war he had been a prominent member of the state-funded Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts. When it was reconstituted as theArts Council of Great Britain in 1945 he was invited to serve as a member of its executive committee, and as chairman of the council's arts panel.[65]
In 1953 Clark became the Arts Council's chairman. He held the post until 1960, but it was a frustrating experience for him; he found himself chiefly a figurehead. Moreover, he was concerned that the way the council went about funding the arts was in danger of damaging the individualism of the artists whom it supported.[2]
The year after becoming chairman of the Arts Council, Clark surprised many and shocked some by accepting the chairmanship of the newIndependent Television Authority (ITA). It had been set up by the Conservative government to introduceITV, commercial television, funded by advertising, as a rival to theBritish Broadcasting Corporation. Many of those opposed to the new broadcaster feared vulgarisation on the lines of American television,[66] and although Clark's appointment reassured some, others thought his acceptance of the post a betrayal of artistic and intellectual standards.[67][n 11]
Clark was no stranger to broadcasting. He had appeared on air frequently from 1936, when he gave a radio talk on an exhibition of Chinese Art atBurlington House; the following year he made his television debut, presenting Florentine paintings from the National Gallery.[68] During the war he appeared regularly on BBC radio'sThe Brains Trust.[68] While presiding over the new ITA he generally kept off the air, and concentrated on keeping the new network going during its difficult early years. By the end of his three-year term as chairman, Clark was hailed as a success, but privately considered that there were too few high-quality programmes on the network.Lew Grade, who as chairman ofAssociated Television (ATV) held one of the ITV franchises, felt strongly that Clark should make arts programmes of his own, and as soon as Clark stood down as chairman in 1957, he accepted Grade's invitation. Stourton comments, "this was the true beginning of arguably his most successful career – as a presenter of the arts on television".[69]
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Clark's first series for ATV,Is Art Necessary?, began in 1958.[70] Both he and television were finding their way, and programmes in the series ranged from the stiff and studio-bound to a film in which Clark and Henry Moore toured the British Museum at night, flashing their torches at the exhibits.[71] When the series came to an end in 1959, Clark and the production team reviewed and refined their techniques for the next series,Five Revolutionary Painters, which attracted a considerable audience.[72] TheBritish Film Institute observes:
With the television camera strolling among the paintings (byGoya,Breughel,Caravaggio,Van Gogh andRembrandt) and the urbane, confident Clark conveying his tremendous knowledge in exceptionally clear English, the viewer was treated to the essence of what the painter saw in his creation (not an easy task in the era of black and white television).[73]
By the time in 1960 when he presented a programme aboutPicasso, Clark had further honed his presentational skills and came across as relaxed as well as authoritative.[72] Two series on architecture followed, culminating in a programme calledThe Royal Palaces of Britain in 1966, a joint venture by ITV and the BBC, described as "by far the most important heritage programme shown on British television to date".[74]The Guardian described Clark as "the ideal man for the job – scholarly, courtly and gently ironical".[75]The Royal Palaces, unlike its predecessors, was shot on 35mm colour film, but transmission was still in black and white, at which Clark chafed. The BBC was by this time planning to broadcast in colour, and his renewed contact with the corporation for this film paved the way for his eventual return to its schedules.[74] In the interim he remained with ITV for a 1966 series,Three Faces of France, featuring the works ofCourbet,Manet andDegas.[76]
I had no clear idea what "civilisation" meant, but thought it was preferable to barbarism, and fancied that this was the moment to say so.
David Attenborough, the controller of the BBC's new second television channel,BBC2, was in charge of introducing colour broadcasting to the UK. He conceived the idea of a series about great paintings as the standard-bearer for colour television, and had no doubt that Clark would be much the best presenter for it.[78] Clark was attracted by the suggestion, but at first declined to commit himself. He later recalled that what convinced him that he should take part was Attenborough's use of the word "civilisation" to sum up what the series would be about.[79]
The series consisted of thirteen programmes, each fifty minutes long, written and presented by Clark, covering western European civilisation from the end of the Dark Ages to the early twentieth century. As the civilisation under consideration excluded Graeco-Roman, Asian and other historically important cultures, a title was chosen that disclaimed comprehensiveness:Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark.[n 12] Although it focused chiefly on the visual arts and architecture, there were substantial sections about drama, literature, philosophy and socio-political movements. Clark wanted to include more about law and philosophy, but "I could not think of any way of making them visually interesting."[80]
After initial mutual antipathy, Clark and his principal director,Michael Gill, established a congenial working relationship. They and their production team spent three years from 1966 filming in a hundred and seventeen locations in thirteen countries.[81] The filming was to the highest technical standards of the day, and quickly went over budget; it cost £500,000 by the time it was complete.[82] Attenborough rejigged his broadcasting schedules to spread the cost by transmitting each episode twice in a week.[83]
Scholars and academics had their understandable quibbles, but for the general public the series was something like a revelation. Art-museum exhibits in both England and the U.S. reported a surge of visitors following each episode.
There were complaints, then and later, that by focusing on a traditional choice of the great artists over the centuries – all of them male – Clark had neglected women and presented "a saga of noble names and sublime objects with little regard for the shaping forces of economics or practical politics".[73][85] Hismodus operandi was dubbed "the great man approach",[85] and he described himself on screen as a hero-worshipper and a stick-in-the-mud.[86] He commented that his outlook was "nothing striking, nothing original, nothing that could not have been written by an ordinary harmless bourgeois of the later nineteenth century":[87]
I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time. I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology.[86]
The broadcasterHuw Wheldon believed thatCivilisation was "a truly great series, a major work ... the first magnum opus attempted and realised in terms of TV."[88] There was a widespread view among critics, including some unsympathetic to Clark's selections, that the filming set new standards.[n 13]Civilisation attracted unprecedented viewing figures for a high art series: 2.5 million viewers in Britain and 5 million in the US.[80] Clark's accompanying book has never been out of print, and the BBC continued to sell thousands of copies of the DVD set ofCivilisation every year.[91] In 2016,The New Yorker echoed the words ofJohn Betjeman, describing Clark as "the man who made the best telly you've ever seen".[84]
The British Film Institute notes howCivilisation changed the shape of cultural television, setting the standard for later documentary series, fromAlastair Cooke'sAmerica (1972) andJacob Bronowski'sThe Ascent of Man (1973) to the present day.[73]
Clark made a series of six programmes for ITV. They were collectively titledPioneers of Modern Painting, directed by his son Colin. They were screened in November and December 1971, with a programme on each ofManet, Cezanne, Monet,Seurat,Rousseau andMunch. Although they were shown on commercial television, there were no advertising breaks during each programme.[92] With the aid of a grant from theNational Endowment for the Humanities, theNational Gallery of Art in Washington DC acquired copies of the series and distributed them to colleges and universities throughout the US.[93] In 1973 he madeRomantic Art Versus Classic Art for ITV.[94]
In 1976 Clark returned to the BBC, presenting five programmes about Rembrandt.[94] The series, directed by Colin Clark, considered various aspects of the painter's work, from his self-portraits to his biblical scenes. The National Gallery observes about this series, "These art history lectures are an authoritative study of Rembrandt and feature examples of his work from over fifty museums".[95]
Clark waschancellor of theUniversity of York from 1967 to 1978 and a trustee of theBritish Museum.[2] During his last ten years he wrote thirteen books. As well as some drawn from his researches for his lectures and television series, there were two volumes of memoirs,Another Part of the Wood (1974) andThe Other Half (1977). He was known throughout his life for his impenetrable façade and enigmatic character, which were reflected in the two autobiographical books: Piper describes them as "elegantly and subtly polished, at times very moving, often very funny [but] somewhat distanced, as if about someone else."[2]
In his last years Clark suffered fromarteriosclerosis. He died on 21 May 1983 at the age of seventy-nine, in a nursing home inHythe, Kent, after a fall.[96]
In 1927 Clark married a fellow student, Elizabeth Winifred Martin, known as "Jane" (1902–1976), the daughter of Robert Macgregor Martin, a Dublin businessman, and his wife,Emily Winifred Dickson. The couple had three children:Alan, in 1928, and twins, Colette (known as Celly, pronounced "Kelly") andColin, in 1932.[2]
Away from his official duties, Clark enjoyed what he described as "the Great Clark Boom" in the 1930s. He and his wife lived and entertained in considerable style in a large house inPortland Place. In Piper's words, "the Clarks in joint alliance became stars of London high society, intelligentsia, and fashion, from Mayfair to Windsor".[2]
The Clarks' marriage was devoted but stormy. Clark was a womaniser, and although Jane had love affairs, notably with the composerWilliam Walton, she took some of her husband's extramarital relationships badly.[97] She suffered severe mood swings and later alcoholism and a stroke.[98] Clark remained firmly supportive of his wife during her decline.[2] The Clarks' relations with their three children were sometimes difficult, particularly with their elder son, Alan. He was regarded by his father as a fascist by conviction though also as the ablest member of the Clark family "parents included";[99] he became aConservative member of parliament and junior minister, and a celebrated diarist.[100] The younger son, Colin, became a film-maker, who among other work directed his father in television series in the 1970s.[101] The twin daughter, Colette, became an official and board member of theRoyal Opera House; she outlived her parents and brothers, and was the key source for James Stourton's authorised biography of her father, published in 2016.[102]
During the Second World War the Clarks lived atCapo Di Monte, a "cottage" inHampstead, or rather "three cottages knocked into one",[103] before moving to the much largerUpper Terrace House nearby.[104] They moved in 1953 when Clark bought theNorman castle ofSaltwood in Kent, which became the family home.[105] In his later years he passed the castle to his elder son, moving to a purpose-built house in the grounds.[106]
Jane Clark died in 1976. Her death was expected, but left Clark devastated. Several of his women friends had hopes of marriage to him. His closest female friend, across thirty years, was the photographerJanet Woods, wife of the engraverReynolds Stone;[107] in common with Clark's daughter and sons, she was dismayed when he announced his intention to marry Nolwen de Janzé-Rice, daughter ofFrederic andAlice de Janzé.[108] The family felt that Clark was acting precipitately in marrying someone he had not known well for very long, but the wedding took place in November 1977.[108] Clark and his second wife remained together until his death.[96]
Clark's parents wereLiberal in outlook, and Ruskin's social and political views influenced the young Clark.[109]Mary Beard wrote in aGuardian article that Clark was a lifelongLabour voter.[85] His religious outlook was unconventional, but he believed in the divine, rejected atheism, and found theChurch of England too secular in its outlook.[110][n 14] Shortly before his death he was received into theRoman Catholic Church.[111][112]
State and other honours received by Clark includedKnight Commander of the Order of the Bath in 1938;Fellow of the British Academy, 1949;Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour, 1959;life peer, 1969;[n 15]Companion of Literature, 1974; andMember of the Order of Merit, 1976. Overseas honours included Commander of theLegion of Honour, France; Commander of theOrder of the Lion of Finland; and theOrder of Merit, Austria.[114]
Clark was elected a member or honorary member of the Conseil Artistique des Musées Nationaux of France; theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences; theAmerican Institute of Architects. theSwedish Academy; theSpanish Academy; theFlorentine Academy; theAcadémie française; and theInstitut de France.[114] He was awarded honorary degrees by the universities ofBath,Cambridge,Glasgow,Liverpool,London,Oxford,Sheffield,Warwick,York, and in the USColumbia andBrown universities.[114] He was an honorary fellow of theRoyal Institute of British Architects and theRoyal College of Art.[114] Other honours and awards included Serena Medal of theBritish Academy (for Italian Studies); the Gold Medal and Citation of Honour ofNew York University; and the USNational Gallery of Art Medal.[114]Clark's old school, Winchester College, holds an annual art history speaking competition for the Kenneth Clark Prize. The winner of the competition is awarded a golden Lord Clark Medal sculpted by a fellowOld Wykehamist,Anthony Smith.[115] At theCourtauld Institute in London, the lecture theatre is named in Clark's honour.[116]
In 2014the Tate held the "Kenneth Clark: Looking for Civilisation" exhibition, highlighting Clark's impact "as one of the most influential figures in British art of the twentieth century". The exhibition, drawing on works from Clark's personal collection and many other sources, examined his role as "a patron and collector, art historian, public servant and broadcaster ... bringing art in the twentieth century to a more popular audience".[117] The BBC called him "arguably the most influential figure in 20th century British art".[118] Clark's early and continuing insistence that Victorian architecture and art should be considered seriously contributed to a gradual change in public taste.[26] The art historian Ayla Lepine writes that Clark's writing and his "perennial commitment to John Ruskin's output and significance" made an important contribution to the re-evaluation of Victorian art and architecture.[119]
Clark knew that his broadly traditional view of art would be anathema to theMarxist element in the artistic world, and was unsurprised when he was attacked by younger critics, notablyJohn Berger, in the 1970s.[80] Clark's reputation among critics in the twenty-first century is higher for his books and television series than for his consistency as a collector. At the time of the Tate celebration of Clark in 2014, the criticRichard Dorment commented that both in his public and private capacity Clark made many fine purchases but also many errors. In addition to theAndrea PrevitaliScenes from Tebaldeo's Eclogues, Dorment lists works misattributed by Clark to Michelangelo,Pontormo,Elsheimer andClaude, and a Seurat and aCorot that were genuine but poor examples of the artists' work.[16]
Among his books is what Dorment has called "the best introduction to the art of Leonardo da Vinci ever written".[16] Piper singles out, in addition to the Leonardo monograph, Clark'sPiero della Francesca (1951),The Nude (1956, based on his Mellon lectures in Washington in 1953), andRembrandt and the Italian Renaissance (1966 from his Wrightsman lectures in New York).[2] The critic Jackie Wullschlager wrote in 2014 that it was as a writer rather than a collector that Clark excelled: "unrivalled since Ruskin for lucidity, erudition, moral conviction".[120] James Hall, inThe Guardian, expressed a similar view, calling Clark "the most seductive writer on art since Ruskin andPater ... "[121] InThe Oxford Dictionary of ArchitectureJames Stevens Curl ranks Clark higher than Ruskin as a writer: "Although he claimed Ruskin was a major influence on his thought, he delivered his own messages with lucidity, elegance, and aplomb, never wallowing in purple prose or exaggeration (faults painfully evident in Ruskin's work)".[122] Hall concludes, "Today, when most art historians write as joylessly as lawyers and accountants, such verve is sorely needed".[121]
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| Preceded by | Director of theNational Gallery 1934–1946 | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by | Chair of theArts Council of Great Britain 1953–1960 | Succeeded by |
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| Preceded by | Surveyor of the King's Pictures 1934–1944 | Succeeded by |
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| Preceded by | Chancellor of theUniversity of York 1967–1978 | Succeeded by |
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| Preceded by New office | Chairman of theIndependent Television Authority 1954–1957 | Succeeded by |
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